More than 30 years have watched Ángel Molina from his mixing board, one of the most emblematic DJs of the Barcelona nightlife since his first steps in 1991 “as a professional”, that is, charging for something he was already doing but that talent and fate wanted it to become their modus vivendi until today. His talent in mixing has projected him to major festivals in Europe and South America, and of course to Sónar, of which he is proud to have attended all 30 editions of a festival that started in 1994 with Molina himself on the bill. A regular presence throughout the history of the advanced music festival that this year, in its 30th edition, will close in a tribute to the roots of the festival and to Molina himself, but above all to electronic music.
He started DJing in 1991
I started as a professional, because I got paid for it, someone said “you deserve this money”, little, but it gave me something for putting on music. From there I had some residences that did not last long, but in a continuous way. It was in 1994 when I participated in the first edition of Sónar.
How has the dj landscape changed?
It has become professional. The resident disc jockey, not the one on the radio or that character who was like another waiter in a club, but what is called resident dj, who is one more guest as if he were a band, began to appear in our country from 94 with all that it means. That he is considered an artist, that he is considered a creator because he is handling pieces that are the themes but he creates. This type of perception that one has today of the dj is not at all what there was 30 years ago. Another important change is that for 15 or 20 years the dj is also a producer, a creator of his own music.
Is it the general rule?
There are very few people and I get into that bag, those of us who have barely produced, have focused on our work and want to vindicate the figure of the dj as a person who puts out songs beyond the fact that he can also be a producer. To this day, when someone thinks of the dj, they think of someone who makes the same music. This is very ingrained.
Has the image people have of DJs evolved?
There is still a perception that what happens at night is bad and therefore not essential. During the pandemic certain restrictive measures were taken but there was permissiveness with the bars, explain to me the difference between a person who goes to have a beer or a gin and tonic at a bar or the one who goes to a club. This feeling that what we do is dispensable, it’s not essential, that it’s young people who are going to get high, it’s still there. I’m not telling you that it’s at the same level as all that carnage that took over the Cod route in Valencia, when more than a decade of electronic music construction was destroyed thanks to the sensationalism of the media. But I still find many people, starting with my family, with that negative perception.
So the social perception hasn’t changed?
After 30 years of monitoring, a massive audience growth where festivals have had a lot to do with it, and Sonar has helped a lot in this, the perception has changed. The people who are fifty years old today were the ones who started dating 30 or 40 years ago, and at that time we did not have that opinion of someone above you, your parents had not experienced electronics. Today we could explain to our children what is there, what can or cannot be done. There has been a change in perception in which the growth of the public has helped. An audience that has lived through 30 years of what has also come to be called club culture.
How has Sónar influenced in this time?
In Spain, it would not be possible to talk about electronic music as it is spoken today without the work that Sónar has done. It would not be so widespread, nor so accepted, the media would not come out. All this work has placed Spain and everything that the Spanish electronic scene means in the world.
What does Sónar have to make it a great festival?
A job well done, coherent, constant and very solid. It has shown the public that electronic music is not only that accelerated music that is heard at night for a certain public profile. It has shown the whole of society that electronic music can be consumed at any time of the day, that any type of public can consume it. For this you must do a very constant job, have a broad vision of music and a lot of knowledge, and I know that the people of Sonar understand music that way because I have known them personally for 30 years.
What characterizes the festival musically?
It’s something very Barcelona, ??I would even risk saying very Mediterranean, having an open perception of music. It is seen in discos when it comes to DJing, with a whole range of styles. Here we are interested in music from here to Haiti. That also explains why you can reach a much larger audience, because holding a very specific festival and dealing only with very specific music limits you. Sonar in the early years was much more concrete, especially experimental and techno music, but over the years it has opened up and I think this is what has also contributed in the last 15 years to making Sonar reach great numbers. of assistance.
Do you have any special memories of your time at the festival?
Beyond the years in which I have worked -I would not be far wrong if I say that I am the person who has performed the most at Sonar- as an audience I have been to all of them, I consider it an essential event. The music that I have always listened to is electronic and I couldn’t understand that this festival was happening in my city and not being part of it. On a professional level, if I have to choose a memory I have to choose the first time I participated. When I was young, 25 years old, having someone organize an international festival and counting on you meant being part of something that seemed important, with people who came from abroad, artists that I idolized and who were there.
How was the session?
It turned out very well, I remember it being very risky, it played technical music of the time and I risked a little more thinking that it was a specialized festival, I took it for granted that it was going to have a specialized audience in front of it. It is what I have been doing in all editions of Sonar, going a little further, and it turned out very well. I have that memory of the audience’s reaction, of how it worked, of the final applause.
Any unforgettable performance?
There are several, for example the first participation of The Knife in 2006, who have only come to Spain twice. Heaven opened up for me, it’s a somewhat strange band because their live shows are almost a performance and especially at that time it wasn’t easy to see. I was expecting a typical concert and it wasn’t like that, it was a performance that lasted as long as it lasted, you couldn’t see them, you didn’t know if it was them or not, they had distorted voices. A concert that I still remember with great affection. Also when X-102 performed, with several of Detroit’s most influential techno musicians such as Jeff Mills, Robert Hood or Mad Mike. Techno is my life, it’s my folklore, my music, and having those people in front of it is another of the festival’s highlights.
Has Barcelona contributed something internationally to the DJ scene?
I would never tell you that there is a Barcelona sound, a Barcelona sound, it is one of the great things that we seem to have been missing, as well as if there are other sounds from other cities like Detroit or Berlin. I think it has to do with our very broad way of understanding music, it’s a very wide range because what Rosalía is doing has nothing to do with what John Talabot does, for example, who is another great name in electronic music. We are like that, I don’t know if it is the Mediterranean character or the character we have due to the large number of tourists, something that impacts you culturally like all cities that have the sea and that have a lot of tourism like New York or Los Angeles. In the long run, they are the most open cities, the ones that culturally offer much more variety.
Thats the secret?
If not, I can’t explain it in any other way that there is such a variety of styles and sounds from the mix, from something I also show very well, such as the Catalan rumba, to an electronic sound such as John Talabot or, on a more commercial level, Paco Osuna. We have many big names that work internationally that have nothing to do with the sound that has always been heard in Barcelona since the rumba years, or the laietà sound in the seventies. In Barcelona it is much easier to do a varied and broad-minded session than not in another city, for example in Madrid. Instead, then you go to Valencia or Alicante, which is Mediterranean, and you notice that music is conceived in another, more open way.
What do you think of the use of artificial intelligence in music?
Every time I hear about artificial intelligence it sounds as futurist to me as the Internet sounded to me 25 years ago. I see it as a technological tool that used well can be very good, and used badly can be the decline. Imagine that there comes a time when technology makes it possible to do without people, this can happen. In its day it seemed futuristic that someone could be transmitting a session from one city and they were listening and dancing from another part of the world. This was seen during the pandemic, but there were people behind it who made it possible. The day may come when artificial intelligence makes me expendable because my music is already in the cloud with all the necessary elements, and no one needs me anymore. It is too soon to judge, but it is an exciting time in which we are seeing things that perhaps a few years ago we could not even imagine.
Do you know Aleix Berger, DJ Sideral?
Yes, in fact, it is another of the anecdotes associated with that key year in what was called Club Culture in Barcelona thanks to Sónar. I came from working at the MKO nightclub. in 1993, where the whole team had focused a lot on the Girona scene at the end of the 80s and 90s, which, given its proximity to France, had soaked up and had its own scene. They are the pioneers in inviting dj’s in Catalonia in the Sala del Cel or in others like Blau. While I was at MKO someone told me that there was another club where they were also playing something similar. I didn’t know the place or the dj, and this is what was later called Nitsa and the dj was Aleix. The first night I stepped foot in Nitsa I saw a very bizarre guy DJing with a clip on his head, that’s the first image I had of him when I went down to the venue. I was fully immersed in the techno moment, which had a totally different aesthetic, and it really caught my attention that this guy was putting out labels and records or songs that I also put on. I was looking at him for a while and when I finished I told him, “I also play this music in another place”. And he answered me, raising his two index fingers to his head as if they were horns, which at that moment I understood to be antennae, “you and I are connected.” That’s how I met Aleix, and from that moment we had millions of experiences together. In addition, for a time Aleix was one of the djs that belonged to the booking agency Advanced Music, which was the booking agency that had created Sonar in 1994. We met at many gigs, at many parties and, of course, in Barcelona . We had a parallel personal and professional relationship.
